The Smells and Bells of Catholicism

On the Proclamation of the Gospel in the Age of AI

The family and I are heading out in about two hours for what looks to be an extremely rainy week in Door County. After a spring where it has done nothing but rain, this is exactly how I want to celebrate the first official week of summer. With more rain. Yay. Before we get in the car, though, I’ve got books to mail, a car to pack, and a newsletter to send. This week, I’ve got an essay for you (scroll all the way down for the audio version), so let’s start with …

Five Fast Things

1. A new Visitation Sessions episode, in which we share, appropriately, some of our worst traveling nightmares.

2. A discount code that you can use to save 35 percent on all novels (65 on the e-book versions, new and old, for kids an adults, published by Ignatius Press: VISITATIONNOVELS.

3. Book recommendations (for which you use the code). My top picks for adults are The Vanishing Woman (a mystery), If You Can Get It (a contemporary novel), and Diary of a Country Priest (a Catholic classic). If you haven’t read the Father Brown mysteries, those too are fun, and Charis in the World of Wonders has been highly recommended to me and is at the top of my list to read soon.

4. A completely random recommendation from Amazon for anyone, like us, who lacks a screen door and has kids who refuse to close the actual door. This magnetic screen is not the loveliest, but it held up when we hosted the end of the year picnic for our school (100+ people in attendance, mostly small children), so it’s sturdy as heck. Chris calls it “life-changing.”

5. A reminder: (beauty)Counter returns next week, Wednesday, June 25. To get the details, you can sign up here.

And now, for the main show.

This morning, my alarm went off at 4:30 a.m., as it does most every morning. I silenced it as quick as I could, not wanting to wake the four-year-old cuddled up next to me (or my husband on the other side of the four-year-old). I then headed to the bathroom, changed into exercise clothes, and made my escape downstairs to the kitchen for coffee. Finally, with mug in hand, I settled into my chair in the still dark living room and picked up the Rosary, which was sitting on the table next to me.

The beads of the Rosary were mulberry colored and wooden, with the faintest scent of roses lingering about them. Each one felt firm in my hand, solid and real. As my mind focused on the mysteries of Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension, my fingers moved across the beads, from prayer to prayer, mystery to mystery, wonder to wonder.

There was nothing extraordinary about my prayer this morning. There was nothing extraordinary about my routine. It repeats itself just like this, with little variation, morning after morning. But today, I felt the consolation of it just a little bit more. I especially felt the consolation of the beads. There was something so concrete about the act of holding them. I felt grounded, not just in prayer, but in place and time and body. What I felt grounded in was reality.

This is one of the great gifts of the Catholic Faith—its fleshliness, its embodiment. In its beads and sacraments, incense and chant, stained glass windows and statues of stone it gives shape and form, texture even, to the eternal and the invisible. It all works together to make Revelation incarnate. It puts flesh on the Christian Faith.

This fleshliness isn’t what drew me back to the Church from Evangelical Protestantism twenty-five years ago. I came home because Scripture, reason, and history convinced me that the Church’s claims about herself were true. Catholicism satisfied my mind in a way nothing else ever had. But once I stepped back inside the Church, it captured so much more than my mind. It captured the whole of me. I often tell people that in the Church, both my soul and my body finally felt at home. My body felt something even more basic than that, though. It felt acknowledged. It felt seen. It was like every part of who I was, every part of me, was finally recognized and accounted for.

In last month’s Free Press story about the recent surge in conversions to Catholicism, you’ll hear echoes of that in the testimonies the new converts share. Yes, a desire to be closer to Jesus, to follow Him in the way He asks to be followed, was why they became Catholic. But that desire was stoked and nourished by tangible manifestations of the Divine. The smells and bells called to them. Jesus spoke through them. He also gave Himself through them.

So, in one way or another, has it always been. Post-modern man is not a new creature. We are as we were, a union of body and soul, encountering God through His creation. But what might possibly be changing in this present moment is our hunger for that embodied encounter.

You and I are living in an age where the distinction between the material and the virtual seems increasingly blurred. We don’t necessarily know when we’re being manipulated or deceived, with the deep fakes of AI and the little fakes of press and politicians growing more convincing by the day. We’re not always sure what’s real anymore. But I think the less sure we become, the more the desire for surety grows.

This is why, perhaps, the Church is attracting so many new converts. It’s also why if any antidote exists to the looming perils of a world powered by Artificial Intelligence, it is the Catholic Faith.